Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Cuban Veterans Poisoned by Agent Orange

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-04-11/news/agent-orange-testing-on-veterans/The temperature hovered slightly above freezing near the end of
winter 1963. A small group of soldiers who had recently been transferred
to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, stood in line outside dusty barracks.
They looked curiously at 55-gallon steel drums painted with an orange
band. After a few minutes, a gruff sergeant called their names and
serial numbers, and they walked into a closed room. They stood still for
a few minutes as a chemical spray settled over their green fatigues and
penetrated their pores."The only proof we have of this is in the lists they used to... take
us to the gas chambers," says Carlos Ruiz-Rojas, a 72-year-old Cuban
refugee who joined the U.S. Army at the height of the Cuban Missile
Crisis in 1962. "And right before entering the gas chambers, they
specified very clearly that after entering, we had to stand there
without moving."

For more than two decades, Ruiz-Rojas, backed by affidavits from
other members of a special infantry unit made up of Cuban refugees, has
been fighting a battle with the U.S. government. He says the Army
intentionally exposed dozens of Cuban-American soldiers to Agent Orange,
a highly toxic dioxin compound used in the Vietnam War to destroy
jungle canopy and deny North Vietnamese soldiers and Vietcong guerrillas
vegetative cover.READ MORE: http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-04-11/news/agent-orange-testing-on-veterans/